Positively Leading

S2E3 - Building High-Performance Teams in Schools with Dr Pete Stebbins

• Jenny Cole • Season 2 • Episode 3

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Unlock the secrets to building high-performance teams in schools with Australia's leading expert, Dr. Pete Stebbins. Pete's incredible journey from aspiring park ranger to clinical psychologist and organizational psychology expert offers a wealth of insights into reducing workplace stress and enhancing team efficacy. Discover why high-performance teams are essential for improving student outcomes and teacher well-being, and learn the difference between high-performance and high-performing teams. Pete shares practical strategies for creating flourishing school environments and emphasizes the critical role of collective teacher efficacy.

Transform your school's environment with actionable advice from Pete on implementing high-performance team systems. Explore four key support systems—measuring whole school well-being, personalized communication using the Platinum Rule, optimizing collaboration, and fostering high-performance teams. Pete provides insights on how to involve all school teams, from leadership to facilities staff, to create a harmonious and efficient school environment. Gain valuable tips on making impactful changes, even with limited resources, and understand the transformative potential of these strategies.

Tackle the inefficiencies of school meetings and focus on well-being with Pete's expert advice. Learn how to maximize meeting effectiveness by breaking agendas into proactive and strategic halves, ensuring both immediate and long-term concerns are addressed. Pete introduces the Platinum Rule for personalized communication and underscores the importance of clear pathways to success. Hear about creating systems that make the right actions easy, fostering a culture of flourishing and well-being in schools. Join us for an inspiring conversation full of practical insights for school leaders and educators aiming to make a lasting difference.

Did you know there is more? You can access every episode, show notes, links and more via my website Positively Beaming.

Jenny Cole:

Hello there and welcome to Positively Leading the Podcast. I'm Jenny Cole. I'm your host and the CEO of Positively Beaming. It is my absolute pleasure to have joining me today friend and colleague, Dr Pete Stebbins. Welcome, Pete.

Pete Stebbins:

Hey, nice to be, here.

Jenny Cole:

I am so thrilled to have you. Dr Pete is Australia's leading expert on building high performance teams, which he does across healthcare and education. He's worked with over 5,000 leaders and 500 schools probably more since you wrote that introduction and he works to develop high performance leaders and teams to maximise collective teacher efficacy. And he has a big goal. I like people with a big goal, and his big goal is to ensure that every school and hospital in Australia is led by extraordinary leaders and that every staff member has the opportunity to be part of a high performance team so that we get the outcomes that we want for our teams and our schools and our students ultimately.

Jenny Cole:

So great to have you here, Pete. I'm sure when you started your career as a psychologist, this is not where you thought you would end up working with school leaders, so give us a bit of a snapshot of your career and how you ended up here.

Pete Stebbins:

Thank you. Thank you, Jenny. The brief history of time so well, if we go right back when I was in high school, again being a psychologist and all that stuff, that wasn't really on my mind. I was actually keen to do outdoor stuff, be a park ranger or a marine biologist, but I had a chronic shoulder injury, rotator cuffs because I was an elite rock climber and I managed to just overtrain and destroy my shoulders. So I got really interested in rehab because I had a lived experience of an injury that just would not heal. And from rehab it seemed to me that some of the biggest challenges we have whenever we've got some sort of exhaustion or injury or just struggling with life, it's a mind game. And so I became interested in psychology that way. I then didn't do very well in high school so I couldn't get in to do a psych degree. So I did a disability studies program which was approved psychology, and through that time I worked in a number of carer roles and all those sort of things. So it gave me a tremendous grounding in disability and caring and being on the ground working with people, dealing with the day-to-day of what goes on for them.

Pete Stebbins:

Jump forward a little bit, I do end up finishing the four-year and the honours and then I move from Melbourne to Brisbane to do my master's degree in clinical psychology and then a PhD. But, as you said, all the while I'm thinking I'll end up being some sort of clinical psychologist, which I did for a long time. It wasn't until I tried to get to the preventative side of the puzzle. How do we start reducing workplace stress? How do we start dealing with as employers and organizations that? I crossed over into that side of the puzzle. Five, six years after that I'm at health and education because they're the most stressful occupations and so hopefully I kept that short. But that's kind of my evolution to where I am today now pretty much exclusively working with schools and how they run, because there are stressful organisations inherently not that anyone's done anything wrong, it's just difficult. And so that's where we can have the biggest impact if we can help those organisations run differently for both the staff and the students.

Jenny Cole:

Talk to me about what a high performance team is and why it's important. In a school, for example, you know our job is to teach kids. Why would we want high performance teams?

Pete Stebbins:

Well, that's a very good and fair question, and I do ask that question, or I often lead in with that what's it all about and why bother, uh? So why bother first? Uh, one of the things we know on an empirical level, um with effect sizes, is this in schools you've had his effects table. Um, it's simply that um, collective teacher efficacy, or teachers working together in teams, produce the highest impact on um student outcomes. So all of a sudden we've got teams of teachers. Working together is important for the students.

Pete Stebbins:

But the other thing we know from organizational performance more generally is that teams that work together well have higher incidences of well-being. So efficacy is not just for the students, it's self-important for me to not burn out, you know, to enjoy my job. So, in a nutshell, teams are therefore the critical thing. But then there's this, I guess, discipline. Because just because I'm in a team, it's going to accelerate or amplify either. Well, for me, like a high-performance team, it really does wonders for us and our students. But the reverse is true too. If we're in a low-performing or dysfunctional team, well, that's going to amplify problems even more. So it's this interesting poison chalice and therefore it's really really important not just that we understand teams, but we actually build high-performance teams in schools.

Jenny Cole:

And so, when you look at high-performance teams, what are some of the things that they do? Well, what's a high-performance doing that that one of those low performance teams is not doing?

Pete Stebbins:

yeah. So getting into the, what's the differences? And, very concretely, what are we seeing, as we say, in education? Um, perhaps I'll dial it back just a tick um, when we think about high performance teams um apologies for being nitpicky we contrast them with not just bad teams, um, but also this idea of high performing ing. You know the noun, yeah, and what's really interesting there, because there's lots of this stuff. It's pretty popular at the moment. It's a high performing team, it's more like a sports team because it's a verb. You know that they've come together and they sort themselves out to win the premiership, you know, to win the cup, to succeed in usually a single big goal, and then they disband again or go into the off-season and so on.

Pete Stebbins:

We find, as organisational psychologists, that's a really bad metaphor to use in a school because unfortunately, in education we have no off-season and we don't have a single grand final that we're trying to go to. We're continuously on acknowledging, obviously, times when we're at school or during the breaks, but we're effectively continuously on as a team and we're continuously playing multiple different grand finals in multiple different sports. So we can't afford to simply do some pretty simple norming performing idea we have to set these teams up with elite kind of systems and processes and ways of working, and we often use like SEAL, team 6 or the military or something like that, as the cliche example, because it wouldn't matter which mission they're on, it wouldn't matter who's in their team, subject to whoever's in the team having done the training, everybody can coalesce around the objective and get it done, and so I really like that way of thinking about it and obviously that translates into being able to achieve well. So in a teaching team, do we have our curriculum plan? Are we constantly looking at weeks one to 10? Are we shuffling around deadlines as different things disrupt, and are we looking at data?

Pete Stebbins:

So that's part of the achievement side. It's kind of like a triangle with different things cascading up and down, and then on the engagement side, we're sort of saying well, as a team, do we understand the basic drivers of people? So as they get more stressed, they withdraw or they become more argumentative, do we know how to just cope with that and cut everybody some slack? And do we have enough knowledge of each other's context, work, life, well-being? Because, look, we have plenty of trouble at work, but we equally have a lot of trouble at home, and so we need to cut each other some slack, hold each other's backs when it's difficult, the engagement and achievement things coming together, uh, in a practical way in a school that creates high performance teams and I love the way that you talk about that, because there are two sides and I I used to call it sort of people and processes.

Jenny Cole:

You know, know the people and know the processes. But you could have some processes, but they didn't necessarily lead to achievement, they were just ways of doing things together. What I love about your model is that we measure the performance of the team, because that's going to have an impact on student outcomes, so how well we work together, how well the communication flows, how well we know each other, and that we actually collect some information about how well teams are going, particularly in team meetings. Can you talk to me about some of the ways that you encourage teams to collect data on the team performance?

Pete Stebbins:

Yeah, of course, and that's really interesting. I like the way you said that about processes and people. And it's just such an extreme sports game high performance teams because we take that idea further. Most of the time, schools are very relationship-centric, understandably so, and so we're trying to trust people, people, we're trying to get to know people, we're trying to trust people, and that becomes the dominant kind of influencer and then we modify our processes because that won't suit the person. We take the entire opposite view to that and we say no, no, no, no, no.

Pete Stebbins:

The school existed well before I came there, and will it probably exist after I finished education. And what our children need? Well, again, that's the same, same for our students. They're coming in and out. So we need robust processes, or we call them systems, Jenny, and those need to be able to cope with the variability of all the people and we need to trust those things.

Pete Stebbins:

And then, when everything gets really, really tricky in schools, instead of us starting to have relationship conflicts because we're letting each other down or we're not really being respectful, we can call each other to account, we can hold each other in a supportive way, simply because we've all agreed that this is our process and it's like a rubber band it stretches our process but it never breaks. So, yeah, it's kind of. I think that's probably the biggest thing for principals and middle leaders and teachers. They're so used to having to get to know everybody or build a foundation of trust relationally that it can really be quite a head shift for them to say so. What you're saying there, peter, is if we all which links now to what you raised if we all know how to meet together, if this is the point in time where I disclose if we all agree about the principles of confidentiality, so I know what will and won't be disclosed out of the room, you're saying I just need to, regardless of whether I've met them or not. I just need to be frank and fearless and honest. And we're saying, yes, that is exactly what you need to do. And you can't do that, even if you know them well, if there isn't universal agreement about what we call the road rules or the ways of working in the team. Somebody, somewhere, will make a mistake, even when we're in tension.

Pete Stebbins:

So in meetings, yes, we have very clear structures and protocols and we have ways to create variance on that. You know what I mean To give everybody a bit of slack to extend time within a meeting item, to ask people to kind of rein it in a little bit. If it gets too heated. We have safety valves and all that sort of stuff and then with their well-being or their collective efficacy or capacity, how full their cup is. Again, we use well-being in a very school's employer focus, a very narrow part of it. We get them to fill out a little 10-second pulse quiz and then once a month they can get a little heat map and that's like a finger in the wind that says you know what? I thought it was tough, and look at that, it's really tough.

Jenny Cole:

Well, you know what I?

Pete Stebbins:

thought it was tough, but it seems like my journey is a little different to the rest of the team. We're actually doing a bit better than I realised. That's good. That's good.

Jenny Cole:

What are your. It creates that psychological safety that we're all talking about at the moment. We don't have to depend on how well we know that person or whether they're the same style as us. That's important, but it's knowing that it doesn't matter what meeting you turn up to. The processes are going to be there. The expectations, the norms, the systems are going to be robust, um and the other.

Jenny Cole:

The kind of theme that I'm hearing is that, um, I always have a bit of a grizzle that education is often. Schools are set up like families rather than businesses and systems, and so in a family, you can disagree with your brother and not speak to them for 10 years, and we can just choose to disengage that person or stop communicating. But we don't have that luxury in an organization. We need to have both some hierarchies, some chain of command, but also some communication structures so that everybody is included. And that's what I love about the work that you do is it not only clearly shows who's responsible for what, but the way that the communication flows and, again, that keeps people safe. Any of the tools that you can talk about or ways that you do that that might help people understand how you build those systems or some of the tools or tactics that you use.

Pete Stebbins:

Yeah, look, we have a little book which they can get off the website Leading Flourishing Schools, and the objective there was right to thin this book as possible, as opposed to the biggest book as possible. So they can jump on the downloads button hptschoolscom and they can just download the book for free. All the downloading is free, there's no passwords, you don't need to just get in and use them and share them. But in that we talk about four, we call it the big four support systems, and we say, look, if we're looking at a school and we're saying, is it flourishing, the first thing we do, instead of necessarily being too uptight about you know how people are treating one another, as important as that is is we actually go beneath how they treat one another, which is why they treat each other the way they do. And and if it is a negative experience, why do they get away with that? Why is that okay? And that's where systems become really, really important.

Pete Stebbins:

And so the four systems are about a system to measure the whole school well-being, a system of communication that we call the platinum rule, a particular way of interacting on the fly with each other, what we call the Goldilocks zone of collaboration, in other words, a particular map of meetings and structures and communication that's optimized with the industrial constraints and the limitations that all schools have to wrestle with. And then, of course, the foundational piece of our work is about high-performance teams themselves. And then with the collaboration map, once we sort out who needs to be in a team and how do we make sure no one's in any more teams than they have to be inside those teams, how do they function. So it's really about those four things and making inroads into those four things, starting with a leadership team and saying, you know, one to 10 on this system, what's our look for here? And so on. Out of that we go right. The important stuff in our context is to really move relatively quickly on this piece. You know we have to eat the elephant one bite at a time.

Jenny Cole:

And that's what I like, because one of my questions is often if you had some advice about where would people start if you were a new team leader or even a senior leader in a school? Again, what I like about this is that this works just as well for the senior executive leadership team as it does for the phase of learning team for year four to seven, and I often ask you know if you had to start somewhere, where would you start? I often ask you know if you had to start somewhere, where would you start? But what I'm hearing is you've got those four key elements and you can kind of start anywhere. Have I got that right?

Pete Stebbins:

Yeah, yeah, where would you start? Oh well, two good things there. So, firstly, those four systems whole school wellbeing, the platinum rule, goldilocks, zone of collaboration and high performance themes. They relate to the entire organization, the whole school, and obviously some parts of school could be doing better than others, and so on. So you can start anywhere you like, which is great. You can start by saying, right, we want to move into this system and or start to implement this idea broadly, or we're going to start with the uh, what we call the elt or slt, the senior leadership team or exec team, and we're going to live out this. We're going to be the guinea pigs. We're going to start with the uh, what we call the elt or slt, the senior leadership team or exec team and we're going to live out this. We're going to be the guinea pigs, we're going to give it a go and we're going to change up how we do things till we're comfortable. But uh, equally, some of the most stunning successes and we wrote about this in some of our earlier work were in the facilities and administration teams. You know, the cleaners working together effectively. Uh, the amount that conflict can generate, the amount of disruption that can cascade around the school, when even those teams aren't doing as well as they need to. And then the amount of heaven on earth when that stuff's just quietly humming along in the background, and the facilities and all the bits that make everything else work. So, yeah, the model works very, very well as a whole school and then very much in each team.

Pete Stebbins:

But look the two things which might shape what we talk about next. I'm not sure, but, uh, I do get asked. It's a lot. And I said look, if you didn't have any time, you didn't have any money. You know all the bets are off, but you want to do something. What is it you do? Uh, two things. I say number one um, sort out your teams and give them great meeting tools, yeah, and support slash enforced. You know, I mean, this is what we're doing. Yes, it might take three to six months. No, we're not deviating off this yet. You've got the l plates on. Keep trying. But yeah, that's our direction. We're going to meet like this, we're going to get our meetings done effectively like that. We're going to be accountable for our action, and that's the number one. If you couldn't do anything else, but you had great meeting systems in your school with your teams. That will be what we call as therapists. We call that the path of elegance, meaning if.

Pete Stebbins:

I do that bit, it's going to set off in motion all the other good bits. The other bit is the platinum rule, which is to introduce a whole school, parent, student, staff, simple language around personality, communication and behaviour. And then literally we call them sticky dots. And if I picked up my laptop and I could show you, you'll see two sticky dots on the back of my screen which are my top two colors in this four color model. So, yeah, I can go sort out your meetings, roll out the platinum rule, and if that's all you can do, that will be enough.

Jenny Cole:

It's certainly I see that work a lot. I've stolen and implemented with glee some of your meeting processes.

Pete Stebbins:

Yeah, you've done that well, yeah, yeah.

Jenny Cole:

I was actually saying to Heidi McGlashan the other day that I've got a group of teacher aids education assistants running their own meetings using your meeting processes. They created their own norms because they didn't quite understand what some of the high-level norms meant and we weren't going to fight about that. If it makes more sense to have some very simple steps that say we all agree to show up on time and to stay connected, then that was great. But they use those processes and they have the moderators and the timekeepers and they share responsibility for being the chairperson. Um, it's absolutely phenomenal and other people in that same school have copied what the teacher aides have been doing, so it's actually from the bottom up, which has been really lovely to watch oh, wow, yeah, so that's what we call it cascading.

Pete Stebbins:

I don't know if that's the right word um, but if you know how, wherever, if it works somewhere, everybody else is like well, why aren't you guys so cranky? You know, why is it? Everyone seems to be smiling all the time. What's wrong with you people? And and and people who are benefiting from these different ways of working are usually quick to share that with other people, because we often, uh, hear about these ideas, uh, and we think, oh, maybe, maybe. Yeah, pete seems to know what he's talking about, but I just don't know. And then we actually get a chance to do them and I'm a doing sort of person. So you could tell me about hot issues, workouts, chairs, moderators, deep dives and I'd kind of nod along in good faith but I'd be skeptical. And then you could allow me to sit in a, you know, with a proper trainer and, like yourself or me, and do it and then they're like oh wow, gee, that was quick, gee, that's sensible.

Pete Stebbins:

No, I didn't feel constrained in any way. Yeah, I definitely had my say yeah, no, I'm happy with what we've resolved from that. Have you seen that with the EA?

Jenny Cole:

Yeah, I have, and I love it when they come back to me and they say well, I call it collaboration. In schools, we waste so much time going off on tangents about whose job it is to put the toys away in the early childhood at the end of the day, so that's what this particular team was doing. They were just wasting time grizzling, and it's fine there's a place for a grizzle, but in a meeting, is not it? And so, introducing them to things like hot issues and having to rank what they're going to talk about, so that we only talk about the most important things, and knowing that everyone's going to get a turn Because I reckon people don't mind meetings, but they don't want their time wasted and they want their voice heard. And again, that's what some of the systems, that some of the processes and systems you use allows people to have voice and for every voice to be heard, not just the loudest, not just the later. Was that deliberate? What's the research, what's the, the theory behind everybody's voice getting heard?

Pete Stebbins:

oh, wow, that's a good question. I'm so sorry. In my mind I went to this the history of the meeting agendas and how they oh, you talk about that, then talk about that, because that probably makes more sense it might overlap.

Pete Stebbins:

Um, yeah, so meetings are such an important part of the puzzle and, again, people can jump on the downloads button see the entire school meeting kit. So, yeah, really want people who are listening to jump in and play with this stuff, not feel constrained. They can execute straight away. But every agenda if we start with idea of schools don't have enough meeting time okay.

Pete Stebbins:

Every team. That's what we call a service team. So now we're talking across industries and across nations. The research suggests they need about 60 minutes per week if they're all full timers and all these provisos to be able to keep on top of everything, keep on top of their relationships together and keep on top of their strategy. That's assuming that hour is used well. Now, if that's all we get and in schools they get less than that, because most jurisdictions in Australia, with teachers particularly, it varies with other roles there's one hour a week in the industrial instruments where teachers are required to attend an after-hours meeting. You know straight after school. And so there's one hour a week in the industrial instruments where teachers are required to attend an after hours meeting. You know straight after school, and so there's one hour a week there. But the principal's got a general staff meeting, they've got PLCs and they've got to give them planning time and marking time etc. So we already fail the test. We cannot give each team what it needs, which is one quality hour a week dedicated, unless we have other budgets and other strategies in our school. So therefore all bets are on these meetings and then we thought we've got to make all the other meetings less important, uh, and then we've got to make sure this meeting they do get is super high quality.

Pete Stebbins:

So the agendas of these meetings are broken into two halves. The top half is proactive stuff getting to know each other and dealing with, like you said, hot issues. And then the bottom half of this agenda is about the strategic stuff, about progressing forward, and every meeting has to do both, because there's not enough meeting time. We can't just have a. Well, we'll have our strategy meeting this week and next week our ops meeting.

Pete Stebbins:

No, no, no, no, no. The ops issues will overrun the strategy between the weeks. And so how do we make sure, when we sit down, we can do something that we can all do? That's addressing both needs all the time, and so that's the architecture behind why this stuff happens and why it happens this way. In a hospital system it's a bit similar, but depending on where they are in the hierarchy of the hospital, they can meet longer and more often. So we can organise longer times or just longer meetings, quite frankly, beyond the hour to really go deep into their strategic plans or other things they have to do and, if necessary, do some extended hot issues into like a crisis management, problem-solving thing. We just don't have that luxury in schools.

Jenny Cole:

No, but when done well, when you've got a really good meeting agenda that covers off on those proactive, relational, reactive and wellbeing things, plus the professional learning, when you can do that, when you can show people you can do all of that inside one hour, it's phenomenal what can happen. And when you've got systems again that people know how it's going to run, they know their voice is going to get heard, they know they're going to get to the bit that they love, which is about talking about teaching and learning, and they're just the operational stuff is dealt with. It's such a good use of people's time. We just don't want to waste people's time. Talk to me about the platinum rule and about understanding the personalities of the people that we work with.

Pete Stebbins:

Yeah, thank you. You know that's a turning as I get older and try to think about my legacy. That system, that platinum rule idea is huge for me and this afternoon, as we're recording this, I'm heading off to a group of parents for the very first time and we're rolling out the very same tools to consider with their families and and that's a huge jump forwards in terms of these ideas and how they've come about. So the platinum rule is about communication, and communication now we're referring to not the school-wide meeting agendas and update tools and information flow. We capture that in the Goldilocks zone of collaboration.

Pete Stebbins:

The Platinum Rule, then, is about relational communication, about like you and I right now directly speaking to each other, and it's to say, we're all unique humans and we all have different traits or flavours or characteristics, and most of the time we get on pretty well and we give each other grace and we're respectful. But when we work in a stressful environment or when at home, when we've got the flu or we're fatigued or whenever we're just a normal human under pressure, which is for most of us a lot of the time, those are flavors, characteristics or traits in how we speak, strengthen up, become stronger, unconscious, we don't know. We're doing it. We're just getting more and more passionate from our own lens. And so this idea then translates to literally communication and in a minute into a system that's really easy to use in a school.

Pete Stebbins:

It translates to firstly, state that we're all different, and everyone rolls their eyes and goes of course we're all different, peter. But then it goes of course we're all different, peter. But then it goes on to say, well, how could we organise those main differences and know those main differences ahead of time? Because most of us are taught to follow in communication the golden rule which says do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And that becomes, you know, not just behaviourally but the way we speak to others. We speak kindly, but only as we understand kindness, display friendliness in a way that we think is friendly, and then they tell us to get out of our personal space and, you know, leave us alone and stop being a stalker and a freak, and so on and so clearly at times. Our version of kindness, friendliness, clear instruction and explicit instruction all of these different things.

Pete Stebbins:

Our version of that sometimes collides with other people. We go hang on a minute. I was really clear with you, but my feedback is showing you don't feel I was really clear. That's this idea of the platinum rule. And the platinum rule says well, do unto others as they would want it done unto them. And that's a completely different game now, because it's like well, do unto others as they would want it done unto them. And that's a completely different game now, because it's like, oh well, I want to be kind to you, but hang on, I can't just assume, jenny, you're like me. I've got to go just as I'm about to open my mouth. What is Jenny's way of kind in this moment? And that's where it begins.

Pete Stebbins:

So understand that idea and then to roll out a pretty straightforward system, you know, of a Jungian kind of, we call it the card model. It's just the four-color Jungian solution and, to you know, sticky dots and lots of little prompts and cues and team profile maps and making that easy so the skills of recognizing are trained. But then the system of having these prompts everywhere in the school, in the classroom, all the students, all the parents, everyone. It's just so easy for me to cue your two sticky dots on your laptop and immediately change what I'm about to say in a way that's probably going to be suiting you better.

Jenny Cole:

Because we all just assume that we communicate the same way as everybody else and that what motivates me and what inspires me is the same as everybody else. And so I don't turn up to work with the intention of annoying the heck out of somebody else. But I might, because I'm coming in with my high enthusiasm, waving my arms around, and somebody else just wants the facts and the details, and so they're annoying me by asking me pesky questions, you know, not low level, but details questions.

Jenny Cole:

And I'm going wouldn't it, I'm going for you and they're annoying me and I'm annoying them, and they're a nice person and I'm a nice person and I didn't turn up to be annoying, but but I am, and nor did they.

Jenny Cole:

So understanding yeah they are and understanding people's styles is so, so important. And just having those reminders, that dot system of you know, just to remember, Jenny's like this and Pete's like that and they like their communication this way and they like their emails that way, and under pressure they might be like this, but you know, normally they're a pretty nice person. That's the stuff that derails teams, isn't it? Because you know that person's nice but you can't stand working with them.

Pete Stebbins:

Yeah, yeah, we say that only 1.2%, according to the research, of the population are innately psychopathic or sociopathic, meaning that they're sitting there right now trying really hard to annoy you because they're getting a kick out of it. Yet 50% or more of us engage in psychopathic or sociopathic behaviors, meaning we're frustrated with someone else and we've lost patience and they need to pay, and we engage in all this unhealthy behavior. And it's getting worse, I guess, as we all get a little more strung out and social media robs us of our ability to think.

Pete Stebbins:

But therefore, the assumption for the majority of annoying people that we encounter is I wonder what's being curious, as we do an education Okay, let's start with the idea that they're probably not a psychopath. Okay, but my goodness, they're annoying the crap out of me, Okay. Well, if I'm going to assume they're not and they're doing this to me, could it be whatever's happened in our transaction hasn't met their needs.

Jenny Cole:

Yeah.

Pete Stebbins:

Could I think differently about what I'm about to say next and change how I say it? You know, praise is fabulous here and we love the just praising someone in the model uh, concept, action, relational detail, or yellow for concept, blue for action, red for relational, green for detail, in the model we share with teachers and students, etc. Um, how you praise someone depends on what they're dominant on. So, again in the model, we've got all four of these CARDs or we wouldn't have jobs or lives. We're trying to get people to think about. You know, in my own candid moment, am I higher on this or lower on that? So here's the example If someone a student or a teacher or anyone was really high on relational or red, so they still can do the other things, but that's their strength.

Pete Stebbins:

When they're tired and stressed, what they really want is praise. That's about respect, kindness, you know, thanks, that's really supportive of you, thanks, that's really kind of you, and they feel good about that. On the other hand, if they're high on action or blue, they don't want to be praised like that. Okay, they don't want someone to come up to them whilst they've just done something nice and go. You know what. That was really kind of you. Thank you, you know. They just feel sick about that because they're action orientated. They just want thumbs up, good job, hey, good job, buddy, that was good. And then that's it. That's the transaction. And they feel buoyant and they feel nourished.

Pete Stebbins:

So teachers, of course, have 23, 25 kids in the class and none of them are the same. They've got to differently, so they've got to be able to quickly work this stuff out, hence the sticky dots on the child's laptop or diary or all the prompts we give, so that they can just instantly praise. You know that they can walk around the classroom saying, hey, katie, that was so supportive. Thank you, hey, jimmy, good job, buddy, you know. Hey, pete, that's awesome. Us yellow people like to be told we're awesome, and the green people? They like to be told that's perfect detail. Yeah.

Jenny Cole:

And the same in our teams. It is just ridiculous for me to go, hey, awesome, when somebody actually just wants to know what the details and the facts are, it blows up, doesn't it?

Pete Stebbins:

It's not just neutral as in they don't care. No, now they think you're sarcastic, now they think you're disingenuous. We suck at praise in Australia and the Western world. We always think people are like brown nosing us. So do you need a straw with that? It's terrible.

Pete Stebbins:

Look the reality for human beings. We're way too lazy, most of us, to praise people sarcastically. It does happen, but it happens way less when we think. The reason we feel that way and when we're so averse to it is either we're like high on the blue thing in the first place, so so we just want short things, that's all we need or we fail to appreciate the fact that everybody's tired and stressed and the right thing to do always favours the lazy person in a high-performance team, which is why I love this stuff so much. If we build a system that makes the right thing to do the easy thing to do, we don't expect people to overreach and constantly be Saint Mary or the Messiah. We expect people to overreach and constantly be St Mary or the Messiah. We expect people to just turn up and do the easy thing, and that's flourishing when the easy thing happens to be the best thing possible.

Jenny Cole:

That's flow, isn't it? When we're just using our top strengths in our most difficult situations. That feels good, that's flourishing, that's feeling like it's easy which is a fabulous.

Jenny Cole:

Thank you for bringing us all the way back to wellbeing, because you said before that you're looking at wellbeing at the kind of organisational level. We're not necessarily talking about people's individual mental health, although the systems in place will help that. Talk to us a little bit more about how a high-performing team is. How do we, what is the focus on wellbeing and how do you do it slightly differently, to say, those schools who are doing PERMA kind of based wellbeing interventions and interactions Nothing wrong with those studying positive psychology, but you do it slightly differently.

Jenny Cole:

Yes, yeah.

Pete Stebbins:

So if we open up that system called whole school well-being in the book and you know the videos and all those things, perm is fantastic, um, one of our. We have um a index in our pulse data. I'll explain all this as we go. Where we publish um, the composite of the 15, you know, doing the best with well-being, the 15 higher schools. So so not only do schools in our systems look at our norms and where the typical school is in australia at any given time of the year because it fluctuates as the year goes on they can also compare with the elite ones, and the elite meaning they're doing it really, really well.

Pete Stebbins:

Uh, it's got nothing to do with their x year or their demographics or anything else. It's got to do with how well they do the work we're discussing in this podcast. But a couple of the most amazing secondary schools are what we call perma schools, so that's an absolute backbone to what they do. So our stuff, you might say, is about wellbeing, but scoping it right down to the legal duty of care and scope of practice of a school and it is about the individual and you know the employee, the student, as well as rolling that out to a whole school risk snapshot.

Pete Stebbins:

So the only real difference there, if we take PERMA, for example, perma is a lovely, quite comprehensive model of wellbeing for young people, and so it's beyond, it's inclusive of and beyond the scope of schools, we would argue, to do all that cool stuff, and indeed it's admirable if they're resourced enough, if they're tooled enough to do the full perma trip. Jealousy, that's wonderful. How can I go work there? What we find, though, is, inside that recipe and inside most of the models we've come across used in schools, there's the wellbeing for learning piece, and that is to say, yes, all things are interrelated with well-being with students, you know, their mental health, their family environment, their access to community relationships, stakeholders, multi-generation. It's huge, but I'm a tired, resource constrained principal and school, and I cannot, you know, I can't really make inroads in all of that without stressing my own stuff out, blowing my budget or compromising all the other core activities to the point that it's defeating itself. We say, look, the research is really, really clear, and it has been well before wellbeing became popular. For a student to learn to their maximum ability, as it relates to your duty of care as a principal, they need high levels of self-efficacy, student self-efficacy, and that's the fact that effect size is 0.9 on the Hattie tables and Albert Bandura not so much Hattie, but it's Bandura's work. We go right back to that social psychologist and now we're in the 80s. There's so much research that we've somehow ignored or tried to soup up. We are not budgeted and resourced and we're not 24-7 mental health facilities. You know we've got to do better with boundary management at school and actually measuring and managing the thing we're actually legally responsible for, which is their self-efficacy. There's four factors for self-efficacy and they can do pulse measures and then they can look at that at a class level. They can't look at an individual level simply because of the way privacy laws work in Australia. There's so much that would be lovely to do if our legal climate was different, but arguably it's better.

Pete Stebbins:

We all think about our journey as a class, a small enough grouping, going back to the idea of team classes, so that's kind of that one, and then a similar translation with collective teacher efficacy and again looking at that in our teams. So we're focusing right in on well-being. We're still measuring every individual in the school. Uh, students are measured slightly differently to the staff, but it's all tied to delivering teaching for staff or, um, achieving uh, asking for help with my teachers.

Pete Stebbins:

You know those very tight definitions of well-being for the students and we say, finishing this off, we say if you've got your SSE, your student self-efficacy, under control, if you've got your CTE systems under control and you've got more time and money perma, fantastic, go do other things, go get big, go with what's right for your community and your context. But you can do all that other stuff in the community and you still aren't measuring and managing STC student self-efficacy. It's going to be awkward for you. You're breaching your duty of care, you're working outside your scope of practice. You know and we're not the ones to deal with that. It'll be the legal jurisdictions that will deal with that. So we don't like to see any of our schools carrying a risk.

Jenny Cole:

We'd rather they manage the stuff they have to really, really well and then they build out to a bigger wellbeing model from there and what you just described. I say a lot to schools around staff, which is people have some, not some. We're responsible for our own mental health and wellbeing. We need to make sure that we sleep well and that we're well hydrated and that we're eating healthy food and that we're exercising. That's our own individual responsibility and that's called fitness for duty.

Pete Stebbins:

if anyone's heard that, yes, that's lovely we have to come to work medically fit. So this is my old job. You know where I was doing public sector act referrals to see if people were even fit for their duties. It's not the employer's responsibility to check that. It's our responsibility to either have a medical certificate and stay home if we're unwell or, if we are well, to meet what we call the minimum standard of job requirement, ie what's in our job description.

Jenny Cole:

I love it. I love it. I'm glad what I just made up actually is based on some sort of research.

Pete Stebbins:

It's not research now, that's just state law, workplace health and safety law. You must be fit for duty if you attend your workplace. Yep, yeah, I know a lot of principals don't get told that very basic hr information and and when we end up like putting return to work plans in place for people who, um were never deemed unfit for duty, yeah, we make all these current hr mistakes in schools and I know, and we make a rod round back. That's the problem with that. It's lovely to be, but then when you're, you know now in all sorts of other hot water, it's probably we probably would have been better to follow the law in the first place.

Jenny Cole:

Yeah, and your wellbeing pulse for staff is a simple four question weekly pulse data that you send people an email, people answer the questions, it gets collated and collected and you've got some really great data about how your teams are tracking or your staff is tracking. It is just a sensational tool and so, if nothing else, if people want to track the wellbeing of their teams, it's an excellent way of doing it because, as you say, it's a lead indicator. So if staff wellbeing has dipped, pretty good indication that behaviour is, you know, on the rise. Inappropriate behaviour is on the rise.

Pete Stebbins:

It will be shortly if it hasn't arrived yet. Yes, yes.

Jenny Cole:

And we know as teachers. We know this third term everyone's tired and sick and cold. Where does behaviour go? But your tool is such a great way of helping schools collect that information in a really simple but useful way drive it back to the team itself.

Pete Stebbins:

You know no one likes filling out a form, even if it's a five second form, and then, well, I never heard the end of that, or so we keep filling this out. Nothing's changed, you know, and I've really. I I'm with them, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I become a jaded employee myself at that point. So the systems that we use, we only ask them four questions about their job satisfaction, about giving feedback in their team, about supporting their colleagues and about whether or not their their work, life and well-being is contained. You know they feel satisfied that they're managing that, or does that? Is that coming out of kilter? Ridiculously easy reflection question. And those tie directly.

Pete Stebbins:

Again, they can download the research papers from our website. They tie directly to collective teacher efficacy, as albert bander formulated it. But then every yeah month we email direct. They get in their inbox the team's scorecard. So there's no ability to again, it's a system they can't say, oh, we never hear about it again. The system's geared to automatically send them every month their team scorecard, uh, and it only shares their team data. Again, individual data must be confidential in these systems, but it means we can all turn up and see if there's any difference between the narrative, how we're talking about our wellbeing and our challenges at work and what we actually plugged into the computer, because we all know answering something into a computer is always more honest than telling someone directly, and we also know that we're lousy historians. If you ask me now how's the last month been, my answer will relate to the last 24 hours.

Jenny Cole:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you take that information and if your team is wobbly a bit with their well-being, we do a team booster and you've got that, that um, on your website too that people can take a look at every week, we email them an automated uh one they can do or ignore.

Pete Stebbins:

So that's right. It's as you say. What we're trying to do throughout all of these things we've talked about today the meetings, the, the communication preferences and even the wellbeing stuff is we're trying to create systems, things that keep working, things that are always there whether I'm having a good day or not.

Jenny Cole:

That was my biggest learning with your work because I'm very relational. It's all about the ideas. I don't have natural structure that when someone like you shared some of those structures, how relieved I felt that there was a safety net that sat underneath this. There was a process that was replicable across the organisation. It was predictable. It reduced cognitive load for teachers. They didn't have to guess what was coming up, they just followed the organisation. It was predictable. It reduced cognitive load for teachers. They didn't have to guess what was coming up, they just followed the process.

Pete Stebbins:

And it allowed you to be relational. It still allowed you to have wild ideas. It still allowed you to put your hands in the air and be Jenny. That's what's really good about system, is it's not actually cramping your ability to be you?

Jenny Cole:

That's probably a brilliant way to finish. Thank you so much for your wisdom. For those people who are in Western Australia, Pete is in WA on the 4th of September. He's attending the Australian Association of Special Ed, which is ACE conference, but it's a masterclass on the 4th, on the Wednesday conference, but it's a master class on the fourth on the wednesday. That's open to everybody. So if you're interested in delving because we just whizzed through it really fast- if you're interested to see how it works.

Jenny Cole:

We'd love you there. Any final bits of advice for perhaps senior leaders. You've seen a lot in your time, anything that that you've noticed that you'd like to give them a bit of advice on.

Pete Stebbins:

Oh look, there's an author, James Clear. He wrote a book called Atomic Habits and I have quote envy.

Pete Stebbins:

I wish I got credit for this quote but that's not helpful or realistic. But the quote and the book itself is a little more personally focused, but I recommend everybody read it. It says look at the end of the day, when all is said and done, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you will fall to the level of your systems. And so I say to school leaders the work we're doing, we're wanting students, staff and parents not to rise up and flourish. We want them to fall down to flourishing.

Jenny Cole:

Yeah, oh, I love it. That is a quote that is literally on the wall next to me for my business, because I can have lofty goals, but it's my systems that get in the way. But I love that extra bit about we don't want them to rise up, we want them to fall down and flourish, you know, in a hospital. I love that extra bit about we don't want them to rise up, we want them to fall down and flourish.

Pete Stebbins:

You know, in a hospital which I know we've got to go, but we talk about the yellow lines of the car park. We don't expect you to know how to get to your car after seeing your loved one. Indeed, we take the time to paint a line all the way through the building and so we're trying to make flourishing happen for the tired, for the stressed, lazy, for the angry and the work we do. That's what it's for. So, yes, if people are keen, I'd love to catch up in Perth, but I always have to keep reminding my leaders that because they keep getting aspirational and I love aspirational goals personally, but that's not the goal of the work.

Pete Stebbins:

The goal of the work is to make flourishing the default in their schools.

Jenny Cole:

I really like that, because it's easy to take the high achievers and make them higher achievers, but we need to bring everyone with us. Thank you so much, Pete, today and. I will put all of Pete's details in the show notes, so if you want to get in contact with him, he's on LinkedIn, he's got YouTube, his website etc. And that will all be there for you. Thank you so much for joining me. You're most welcome. It's been a pleasure.